Coastal Cleanup Day: Way More Than Your Average Beach Cleanup

Hi! I’m Taylor Goelz and I’m the new Outreach Intern at I Love A Clean San Diego. I’m a junior Environmental Studies major and French minor at University of San Diego, right up the road from the beautiful Liberty Station location of ILACSD. I was super excited at the prospect of interning with ILACSD because I wanted to be able to make a real difference environmentally in the city of San Diego and I couldn’t have chosen a better place to intern for the semester!

ILACSD Staff & Interns setting up in Serra Mesa

I just started my internship last week and I was quickly thrown into Coastal Cleanup Day mode. Over the summer when I was being interviewed by the lovely Community Outreach Coordinator, Lexi Ambrogi, practically the first question she asked me was if I was free on September 15th for this event. It was intimidating enough being the new girl, first week on the job, but of course the biggest event that ILACSD holds all year was going to be the first event that I attended! Hearing my alarm go off at 5:30 last Saturday was rough, I’m not going to lie, but once I got to the site and started unloading the U-Haul full of stuff with the rest of the staff and interns, I started to get really excited for the day that lay ahead.

You never know what you’ll find at CCD, this “yarn forest” was quite a surprise!

Lexi had forewarned me that the Serra Mesa Community Center that was serving as the Kickoff Site this year had about 300 volunteers registered but nothing prepared me for the vast amount of people that started descending on the registration table that I was working starting at 8:30! ILACSD had encouraged people to BYOB (bring your own buckets) and gloves and I was pleasantly surprised at how many people showed up lugging big buckets!

The only unfortunate thing about Coastal Cleanup Day was the heat! Now I’m from Tucson, Arizona and typically I can handle heat, but Saturday was a whole different kind of hot, even for me! I was so happy that despite the triple digit temperatures volunteers still came out and did some amazing work! While the final totals are still coming in, even with the heat, we are estimating that Coastal Cleanup Day drew over 7,200 volunteers at the 88 cleanup sites around San Diego County. The numbers are in for the amount of trash, recyclables, green waste (mainly invasive species pulled from area parks and canyons) that ILACSD collected on Saturday and we collected 150,000 poundsof trash and debris!

Volunteers bringing back their haul!

Thank you to all of the amazing volunteers who took time out of their busy lives, and braved the heat, to make our community a cleaner, healthier place to live!

If you weren’t able to make it to Coastal Cleanup Day, or if you came out to volunteer and want to make your impact last even longer, you can text the word CLEAN to the number 80888 to donate $10 to I Love A Clean San Diego!

No personal information is required; the donation will simply show up on your next cell phone bill. Your single donation of $10 can help us remove an additional 300 pounds of trash from the local environment in the next year!